The Mistress of Nothing (17 page)

“Wait till my Lady sees!” I said to Omar once the villager had left, “wait till she sees him, a little Egyptian prince in his basket!”

Omar did not reply. I looked at him but he would not look at me.

I hadn’t spoken to my mistress since the night the baby came into the world and, truth be told, I hadn’t thought to worry. I was occupied with the baby and sleeping and eating, and while we were traveling Omar would not let me get up from my bed for more than a few minutes every day. He tended me and the baby and our every need, and he tended my Lady as well. I wasn’t thinking of anything beyond the baby and the pains and sensations of my body. I had had a good birth—I had attended enough bad ones to know it—and I had not sustained any permanent injury, but I was battered and felt as though I’d come through a great trial. But the baby! There he was for me to hold, for me to care for, for me to wonder at, for me to share with my beloved Omar. And that’s what we did for long moments on the
dahabieh,
we huddled close together in my cabin and smiled at our baby and talked about what life would be like once we were back in Luxor, once we were married.

We chose the name Abdullah for our child, the name of the father of the Prophet Mohammed. Abdullah Abu Halaweh. “And that makes you Abu Abdullah Abu Halaweh,” I said to Omar at the time, laughing and poking him in the chest with my finger. He grabbed my hand and pulled me to him, kissing me.

Now we were back in Luxor, I still had not seen my Lady. All the fears and worries we had discussed during the past few months came rushing back to me. Where was she? Where was my Lady? Why did Omar discourage me from taking Abdullah to her? Why had she not been to visit me? In my cozy fug aboard the
dahabieh
I had expected to take up my duties as lady’s maid once we returned to the French House; in fact, I was looking forward to spending my days with my Lady once again. I had pictured Abdullah in his basket on the floor of her room, my Lady looking up from her writing to coo at him from time to time, while I bustled about the place, a model of maternal efficiency. When he woke and cried out, my Lady would pick him up and bounce him in her lap and then carry him through the house to me. Abdullah would be a most welcome, a most venerated member of our Luxor household, our Egyptian family. A baby and, best of all, a boy.

But this picture I had created was beginning to crack in its frame.

ABDULLAH WAS SOUND ASLEEP IN MY ARMS, THE SUN HAD SET, AND
the starlit night was upon us. I tucked him into his basket and lit a lamp in the far corner on the little table I used as a writing desk. I hadn’t written to Ellen in Alexandria about the baby yet; she knew nothing of him, despite the fact that I had seen her less than two months past. I would write a letter and tell her everything.

I look back on our time in Cairo that autumn with a kind of amazement. There I was, almost fully at term, and no one noticed. Not even Ellen. Like her mistress, Mrs. Ross, my sister did not approve of the way that my Lady and I were living, did not approve of the way we dressed, the way we’d adopted local customs, the way I shopped with Omar in the market, the way we ate our meals together with my Lady seated on the floor around a silver tray, and she was blinded by her disapproval from truly seeing me. Even my Lady’s new English doctor, Doctor Patterson, who saw me in Cairo just a few days before Abdullah was born, did not come near to guessing; he was more concerned with my Lady’s health and making sure our medicine box was up to date, and rightly so.

I began my letter:
Dear Ellen, I have something to tell you, the most wonderful …
, but I could not continue. Why had my Lady not been to see me and the baby? I knew her too well; she must be longing to see us, she must be dying of curiosity, she will want to know everything. It had been more than a fortnight since that night on the Nile, nearly three weeks. Suddenly my doubt had grown to disease, blossoming as rapidly as jealousy. I checked that Abdullah was still sleeping soundly and left my room.

Omar was coming down the corridor; he was carrying a candle and it flickered in the draft. The house was full of drafts, given its many glassless windows and doorless doorways; on windy evenings we could not keep any of our lamps alight.

“Is my Lady awake still?” I kept my voice low though I knew it wasn’t late. “I thought I might speak to her.”

“No” was all Omar said, and he said it wearily.

“What do you mean, no?” I asked; I was still tired enough from the birth and the journey to be easily pricked and annoyed and to feel justified in wanting to have things my way.

“My Lady has said …” He hesitated, and I felt my heart sink, as though it knew already, well before the rest of me. “My Lady has asked …” He paused again, trying to find the words. “She has given me instructions for the household.”

I didn’t understand.

“I am in charge of the household now.”

I took a step back. It was my household. Even in Egypt, where we were often on uncertain territory, it was my household; I was Lady Duff Gordon’s maid and thus, in the absence of an English housekeeper, responsible for the smooth running of the household. I was in charge here, answerable to no one, apart from my Lady.

But, of course, everything had changed. Omar was the father of my child. We had plans to marry. He would be my husband; he would have dominion over me. But it was my household. He was an Egyptian. I was English.

“What do you mean?” I didn’t want to feel this way.

Omar sighed, as though his new role weighed on him heavily.

“My Lady has said …” Again he stopped, and turned away to fuss over the candle, which was burning a little blackly.

“What has she said?” I asked, my voice harsher than I intended.

“You are to stay in your room with Abdullah. This is what she has said.”

“But I am feeling quite well and restored already. I can tell her that myself.”

“Sally,” Omar said, taking my hand, turning me around, guiding me back into my room. “Listen to me.”

I did not like to see him looking so grave.

He kept his voice low. “My Lady does not want to see you, or the child.”

I was too blasted by his words to reply. My Lady does not want to see me, or my child. My Lady will not see me. I have been by her side for years and years, but my Lady will not see me.

“She does not want—she believes that …” He stuttered and stopped.

I gasped out loud when I saw that he was weeping.

“She blames you entirely.” He swallowed hard and forced himself to speak. “She will not listen to me. She will not allow me to defend you. She says you have corrupted me; she says you have led me astray.”

Now I could see that Omar was angry as well.

“I have told her that I am a man and that I knew what I was doing and that I take full responsibility. That we have made our plans. That we will marry. But she will not hear me, Sally. She will not let me speak in your defense; she has used terrible words; she has said terrible things about you to me.”

“She will not see me?”

“No.”

I remained confused. We should speak in English. Or were we speaking English already? “When we are married …”

He shook his head. “It will make no difference to how she feels.”

And if I thought that was the worst he could tell me, I was wrong.

I thought, my Lady isn’t thinking straight, she can’t be. She is so full of anger and sadness and fear over losing her own family that she can’t allow me to be happy in this way. But she’ll come round, she’ll calm down, and she’ll remember that it’s me, her faithful servant, her devoted lady’s maid, Sally Naldrett, her Sally; she will remember herself, her good strong fair self, and then she’ll remember me. She’ll see Abdullah, and she’ll love him; how could anyone fail to love him? She’ll see the baby and then she’ll know she must do what is right. That’s what I thought. That’s what I kept on thinking.

“She wants you to leave the French House.”

“To leave?”

“Not now, not right away, it is too early, the baby is too young. But she does not want to see you, and then, in two or three months, when you are both strong and fit, she has said you must leave. Abdullah must go to my wife Mabrouka in Cairo and you must return to England.”

In that moment, my life was ruined. With her words, relayed to me by my lover, I was destroyed.

I NEVER THOUGHT I COULD BE SO HAPPY. I NEVER THOUGHT I COULD
be so frightened of what the future would bring. To feel both these things at the same time exhausted me.

That night on the boat my Lady helped us bring Abdullah into the world and she was as gentle and skilled and unhurried as any midwife; when first she arrived in my cabin I forgot the torment for a moment and felt ashamed to have my Lady see me so plainly, my nightdress shoved up around my shoulders and me there, screaming, but she did not blink once, nor even hesitate, and I felt a surge of relief almost as profound as the waves of pain passing through my body. It will be all right, I thought, my Lady is here now, my Lady can deal with almost anything.

It was Christmas Eve, and a dark and moonless night on a long, dull, unpopulated stretch of the river. All day I’d been feeling peculiar, itchy almost, heavy, restless, and tetchy. Of course, I didn’t recognize what was happening: I was too stupid, too bovine with pleasure, as though I might stay pregnant forever and be happy that way. And neither did Omar, despite the fact that we had prepared ourselves for this to happen while we were on the
dahabieh:
we had laid in secret supplies; we had readied ourselves like good midwives; I had coached Omar in all I knew about childbirth and labor. It began in the early evening and I kept it to myself, walking up and down the boat, pursuing every task I could think of, until every fixture and fitting on the
dahabieh
was shining. I saw to my Lady, got her ready for bed, and went back to my pacing, until Omar came to ask me why I wasn’t coming to bed. It was late, and my Lady had been asleep for several hours; she was sleeping heavily at that time, during the day as well as at night, her lungs like lead, the ache in her side continuous once again.

It stepped up then, the pain; it came upon me as a full-force gale comes upon a ship at sea. We were in my cabin and I was trying to keep quiet, I was working hard to control myself, to prevent myself from screaming as I was battered by the waves. But after a few long hours—how long, I have no idea—I could no longer hold it back and I was transformed, as all women are transformed at this time, into my animal self, raw and beyond sensibility. I know I made a most terrible racket. And Omar was frightened. He has never admitted as much but I know it must be true because, though I was not aware of it at the time, he went to fetch my Lady. Midwife was not a role he had performed in the past, and all our talk and planning proved to be feeble and wrongheaded when it came to the real thing. There came a point when he needed help with helping me, and he went and woke up my Lady.

It would have taken her a while to surface. Even if she’d heard my cries far off, muffled, she was sleeping too soundly for the sound to register fully. She would have turned in her bed—What was that, an animal at the riverbank?—then rolled back into sleep. But she was forced up again before long: What is it? And then, right then, Omar began to shout “My Lady! My Lady!” and he pounded on the door of her cabin with his fists. She got out of bed and wrapped her shawl around her shoulders and opened the door, where she found Omar, distraught, shivering.
“Sitti
Duff Gordon! Come! Sally needs you! Come with me!”

My Lady rushed behind Omar down the narrow passageway and they entered my cabin, Omar first, my Lady behind him, fearful of what she might see.

What she saw was not what she feared, but something very different. I know this now. Something much worse.

She saw me, in the throes of labor. Her maid, Sally Naldrett, spinster, age of at least thirty, crying out, hunched up on the bed, sheets and nightdress streaked with blood, wild with pain and concentration.

“Help me, my Lady,” Omar said, stronger now, knowing I needed him to be strong for me. “Help me deliver my child.”

And that was how my Lady found out that I was pregnant. That was how my Lady found out about Omar and me.

THE REST OF OUR JOURNEY DID NOT GO WELL. THE DAYS PASSED LIKE
a long slow convoy of
dahabieh;
they slipped by quietly, one at a time. It was winter, but the afternoon sun was still warming and my Lady continued to spend most afternoons outside on the deck of the boat, watching Egypt slide by. The
fellahin
labored in the fields and brought their produce to sell in the villages. A millennium passed and it looked as though nothing had changed. But, in fact, change was rapid, on the land, for the people, and on our
dahabieh.
Nothing remained the same.

LATER OMAR TOLD ME THAT WHEN HE WENT TO MY LADY’S CABIN
bearing fresh water and a clean basin the morning after the birth of our child, he apologized for being late. “I am sorry, my Lady,” he said, “once I knew Sally and the baby were fine, I fell asleep. I slept for much longer than I intended.”